September 14, 2004

WHAT'S THE UNDERCARD, MARX VS. SMITH?:

On consecutive Wednesdays this month (Sept. 15 and 22), PBS stations will be airing a two-part documentary, The Question of God: Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. It’s a study in contrasts between two of the most influential men of the 20th century: the atheist Sigmund Freud, who held that all human affairs could be explained by secular psychoanalysis, and the ex-atheist Lewis, who became the most popular Christian writer of his era and beyond.

Recently I saw a one-hour preview of the four-hour special. Based on what I saw, I have to say, not everyone will be fascinated by every minute of it; it includes a fair amount of debate among academic types that many viewers may find heavy going. But at the heart of the show are compelling segments from the lives of both Freud and Lewis (including actors’ re-creations) that demonstrate the stark difference between life with God and life without Him.

The two men actually had their similarities. Both suffered blows to his faith early in life: the Jewish Freud when his family fell into sudden poverty, the Christian Lewis when his mother died and his father withdrew into often-tempestuous grief. Both emphasized the value of reason, though Lewis (unlike Freud) recognized its limits.

And above all, both agreed on the importance of their disagreements. As Harvard Professor Armand Nicholi (who teaches a course on which the documentary was based) says,

Are these worldviews merely philosophical speculations with no right or wrong answer? No. One of them begins with the basic premise that God does not exist, the other with the premise that He does. They are, therefore, mutually exclusive — if one is right, the other must be wrong. Does it really make any difference to know which one is which? Both Freud and Lewis thought so. They spent a good portion of their lives exploring these issues, repeatedly asking the question, “Is it true?”

No “you-have-your-truth-I-have-my-truth” wimpiness for these men; no “all that matters is that you have beliefs which have meaning for you” cop-outs. It made all the difference in the world who was right and who was wrong, and both of them knew it.

The match-up here is hardly fair. Max Beerbohm effectively annihilated all of Freudianism in a sentence: "A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?" Meanwhile Lewis's own writings continue to influence us today and the case he was defending continues to change the world:

I have often asked myself why human beings have any rights at all. I always come to the conclusion that human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because, under certain circumstances, people accept them without compulsion and are willing to die for them, and they make sense only in the perspective of the infinite and the eternal. . . . While the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.-Vaclav Havel, The New York Review of Books

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2004 9:27 AM

Comments

Freud's legacy is more than just "All human behavior can be explained without God".
Even if God is someday proven to exist, and even now, after most of his theories have been discredited, his greatest accomplishment is the now universal application of the idea that broken minds can be fixed.

Relatively few have been harmed by Freud's life work and its aftermath; many have been helped.

Marx had his moments, too; Capitalism isn't all fun-n-games, and as you have pointed out many times, oj, even if workers haven't seized the means of production, they've certainly seized the spoils of production.
American society is socialist, as seen from a Nineteenth century perspective, and it's going to stay that way.

And, no, neither of them is responsible for totalitarianism in general, or the USSR in specific, or the entire philosophy of "Rationalism".

I have no idea how many broken people God has cured, or what percentage of broken people God fixes, but very clearly, She does not deign to fix all broken people.

Therefore, it falls to humans to do what we can for the remainder.

Matthew 25:35 ~ For I did hunger, and ye gave me to eat; I did thirst, and ye gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and ye received me.

From that, I take it that we are to care for one another, and that was exactly what Freud did, perhaps badly, but no worse than anyone else in his time, and, AND:

He founded an endeavor which continues to this day, one which, for all of its flaws and foibles, helps people, in ways that religious faith cannot.
As I said above, even if Freud's cures were quackery, (and in large part they were), it's the modern result that counts.

We enjoy disparaging the psychiatric profession, and Thor knows that they take themselves too seriously, they assign infallibility to poorly tested theories, and many of them seem as though they could use some brain-shrinking themselves. However, as with lawyers, another profession we love to hate, as a group they perform needed work, work that makes life better.

Freud, Marx, and Darwin may have been the people whose names and works made an impact, but only because humans and their societies were ready for such ideas. If the times weren't ripe, their ideas would have fallen on barren ground, and their names would be academic trivia.

Lewis is a very articulate apologist, but I don't know of anyone who became a believer because of him. He's a favorite of the religious crowd because he provides them articulate arguments for God's existence based on beliefs and assumptions that they already hold. As with G K Chesterson or Dostoyevsky, he has written arguments that sound undeniable to the believing temperament, and which they imagine will devastate the unbeliever into submission. He never proved God's existence, he just gave the believer witty and articulate ways to express and defend their beliefs.

One comment about Lewis - there are times in life when we run into people who simply are more substantial than we are. People who are more learned, more wise, more real. People who have done the thinking and the internal work about life, where most everyone else just has vague cliches and pop culture impulses. People who are vital, in all senses of that word.

I don't know who those people are for you, but I seriously doubt if Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Peter Singer, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, or John Wesley Spong make the list.

Your brain is abdicated when you refuse to admit that there are people who have thought through philosophy (and literature, in Lewis's case) far more deeply and effectively than we ever could.

Steven Den Beste is a good blogger, and he writes good evaluations on a number of subjects, but philosphy and religion are not among them. And if he is your best example (of a substantial person), then aren't you saying that a contemperaneous engineer with a flair for writing is your guiding light? To be blunt, you might as well pick Orrin Judd, Glenn Reynolds, or Stephen Bainbridge.

Now, I am not asking that you assent blindly - but merely to recognize that neither you nor Den Beste is going to win any argument with most of what Lewis wrote. One of the reasons Charles Colson became a Christian is because he was humbled by Lewis's thoughts, to the point that he said he never would want to face Lewis in court, because he knew he could not win.

Remember, the strongest "attraction" for people to Lewis's writing is not his academic approach (that is almost always a turn-off), or the relentless pounding with persuasion (he did not want to be an evangelist), but his simple style, as though he was just having coffee with the reader.

And Lewis knew the road from atheism to faith, having been a 'militant' atheist for probably 10-15 years before becoming a Christian.

Gideon, no, the point is whether god is fixing her brain (or any other). Orrin made a flip and cruel remark, because his original statement was insupportable, as each of us knows from his own experience.

I'm not a healer. The most I can do for my friend is to try to keep her from being pauperized by the Christians. I'm not doing very well, but not for lack of trying.

I have read his essays on the subject, and been extensively exposed to your arguments. You utterly fail to demonstrate your case in all respects.

What I find astonishing is you chuck your obvious analytical skills straight out the window on this subject, and rely on the sort of logic and abuse of evidence that you otherwise deride when it comes from the Left.

This thread is a classic example. Apropos of nothing, you assert human activity is the cause of the competition, and that there has never been a case of naturally induced habitat change other than catastrophic. The former is both unknown and irrelevant, and the latter roundly contradicted by evidence--continental drift is just one such example of widespread gradual change.

The stories do not all assert that. In the other thread someone posted a quote that the naturalists had no ideas what the cause was, and that it could have been going on for quite some time due to reasons having nothing to do with humans.

Continental drift doesn't cause extinctions? Surely you jest. How many animals or plants exist both in NH and the Mojave Desert?

Would that be the same necessary Creation flaw/feature that requires women in their agonized, terrified millions to die of childbirth? Does it require preeclampsia, ectopic pregnancies, breech births and bleeding to death for all kinds of reasons?

One would think a Creator powerful enough to create the Universe with man as its raison d etre, and possessing of any moral awareness would do something about that little "flaw."

Gen 3:16 To the woman He said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." 17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.

In other words, life is painful - childbirth in particular - and our lot is hard toil, because we screwed up right at the beginning.

There were initial humans and they were most likely produced by intelligent intervention in the evolutionary process, the same way we get evolution now. There likely were no epidurals used, but that seems a side issue.

No, Christ brought us a New Covenant and rendered many of those Old Testament prohibitions null. He was the vehicle by which God finally came to comprehend His Creation--Forgive them Father, they know not what they do--and forgave us our propensity to evil. We are commanded to "Love one another" as He loved those around him. He'd have alleviated a woman's extreme pain in childbirth.